Participant Story: Liz

“Getting ethical corporate accountability practices to trend across the industry would be great.”

1) Tell us a little about your life.

I live with a cat named Garrus, who is both handsome and a very good boy. My previous career was in technical recruiting, and my hobbies include comedy, video games, ice skating, collecting uranium glass and the manga/anime series “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.”

2) What made you decide to apply for Techtonica?

I saw a tweet about Techtonica, checked the website, and found out that the deadline for applying was just a few days away. A happy accident!

3) What are you most excited to learn while at Techtonica?

I feel like working with APIs is going to be very exciting for me. I only tangentially understand what APIs are.

4) What do you want to contribute to or change about the tech industry?

Engineering hiring, retention, and promotion structures for sure. Getting ethical corporate accountability practices to trend across the industry would be great too. But I’d also be happy just making cool things.

5) What’s your dream project?

Introducing and passing legislation to give dogs the right to vote.

Oh, with coding. In that case, I don’t have a grand scheme in mind but have had the idea of making a “swear jar” app that integrates with GoFundMe and similar platforms. You could set up a jar for a group of people, let’s use the example of “pronoun jar.” Whenever someone in the group does a pronoun oopsie, they can contribute to the jar, which will send the collected money to, say, a nonbinary person’s top surgery fund. It’s a neat way to directly impact people financially and with our words, that would mitigate some of the weird guilt and shame most of us have about the normal mistakes we make while we’re learning new things.